4.1 Basic and Enhanced lint Modes

The lintprogram operates in two modes:

Basic, which is the default

Enhanced, which provides additional, detailed analysis of code

In both basic and enhanced modes, lint compensates for separate and independent compilation
in C by flagging inconsistencies in definition and use across files, including any
libraries you have used. In a large project environment where the same function
might be used by different programmers in hundreds of separate modules of code,
lint can help discover bugs that otherwise might be difficult to find. A
function called with one less argument than expected, for example, looks at the
stack for a value the call has never pushed, with results correct in
one condition, incorrect in another, depending on whatever happens to be in memory
at that stack location. By identifying dependencies like this one and dependencies on machine
architecture as well, lint can improve the reliability of code run on your
machine or someone else’s.